Main Page

This wiki is intended to be a repository of information and a baseline for research of the space elevator, a project with a back-of-the-envelope launch cost of $6 billion dollars.

A space elevator will be about 100 times cheaper per pound because it has momentum transfer through a mechanical structure. Rockets must carry all their fuel, and then even more to accelerate that fuel. There are other potential possibilities besides the space elevator, but we as fans of space colonization need to each push for something more efficient and safer than rockets.

Here is a paper explaining how we could build one in less than 7 years.

If you have done some research on the SE you'd like to archive and tell others about, please go here and fill out a section. (This site gets about 2,000 visitors per month.)

Latest news

Keith Lofstrom, of the Lauch Loop fame, has written a very interesting paper analyzing the baseline Space Elevator designs and identifying challenges and coming up with some great suggestions. He also proposes multiple stages, multiple climbers, a pulley for the first stage, and some ideas on how to get to GEO in just 1 day. A few of these suggestions should probably be saved for a "version 2" of the elevator, but it's a must-read. He also wrote a paper about acoustic wave-powered climbers.

(This is a bad deployment showing what happens with no compensating control interventions by the satellites at either end of the ribbon. We have to have lots of failures in simulations to have success in real life!)

Brad Edward's presentation on manned travel up the elevator is uploaded.